Small Thoughts Big Feelings: It’s Not the Sound, It’s My Nervous System

 In this Small Thoughts, Big Feelings mini, Kari reflects on noise sensitivity. From vertigo triggered by sound to the sudden anger that comes with repeating yourself or speaking louder, this episode explores how sensory overload shows up in the body.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

This is a small thoughts, big feelings mini from both sides of the couch. I'm Kari, and today's thought is small, but the feeling definitely isn't. There are certain sounds that don't just annoy me. They make my body feel bad, like vertigo, bad rage, spiky, nervous system, short, circuited, bad. Some people would call this misophonia, which is a clinical term for when certain noises make you irrationally angry or disturbed. I don't know if it's that. I just know that my nervous system is very aware sometimes, and also it's very done sometimes. So the first connection I see for me is being a therapist. Hyper attunement is a survival skill. You learn in Therapy 1 0 1, we're trained to listen deeply. And my nervous system never fully powers down. I think every therapist is like that to some degree. We spend our professional lives tracking tone shifts and subtext. Our body learns to stay alert even when we don't mean for it to or even wanted to. cause that's what we're doing in session. I Do think there's also a chronic illness lens here, and I think a lot of people who suffer from chronic pain disorders or similar chronic illnesses that I have know that noise can actually feel like physical pain in your body or cause physical symptoms to worsen. I mean, a great example of that is migraines. When I feel irrationally angry because I have to repeat myself or raise my voice so someone can hear me. I know it's not actually about the conversation. It's my body saying, this is too much input, too much effort, or too much demand right now. But when I'm experiencing it, it just feels like I wanna scream except hearing my own scream. Would send me into a rage of continuous screaming where the cycle would never end. So instead, I have to bite my tongue and repeat whatever I'm saying. It also shows up in hearing certain swallowing noises. It just feels like my skin is crawling when I hear it. And I also know that when it's bedtime and it's my wind down, like my brain and body is like we're in bed and we're resting. Even a whisper sounds like somebody is yelling. So any little noise happening in my house feels like an attack. Literally, sometimes I will jump because the noise is so jarring. So if you ever sleep in my house, just know you will be hearing very loud pink noise to drown out everything else going on. So I'm learning that this. Anger that I feel when these noises arise, is just information for me. I don't think that I'm fragile. This noise sensitivity isn't like a sensitivity as in fragility. It's just my nervous system and it's doing its best. And I think I tend to avoid loud spaces because it gives me a bad physical reaction. Maybe other people avoid them just because simply they don't like them. But I know I'm gonna feel bad afterwards, so I can't really do live music anymore because it's too loud and it's too, I don't know what you call that, but I feel it in my body and it does not feel good. It could trigger extreme dizziness for me, so I'll just keep reminding myself. It's not the noise that's too loud. It's my nervous system has already heard enough. If this mini episode resonated with you, share it with a friend or drop a comment. Thanks for listening to both sides of the couch.